The Passion of Pam

^^" ven before her mysterious death in 1962 created a cottage industry in martyrdom, Marilyn Monroe, the quintessence of the blonde American sex ^^ goddess, had already begun turning her distinction into a less than unalloyed triumph. With feminism on the horizon as Marilyn's star soared, she became the poster girl for female victimhood—a victim of the ^^ men who used and abused her; of Hollywood, which exploited her and then tossed her aside when she asserted her independence; of the disjunction between the dumb-sexy image she was forced to purvey for her fans and the sensitive soul within. Where Marilyn led, others followed. Ever since Marilyn, sex bombshells have generally had to languish in the same tragic backwash of broken relation­ships, drugs and alcohol, enforced bimboism and self-abasement, as if one needed to be punished for being alluring. But there has been one glaring exception to this pattern of sexual retribution, one woman who seems to embrace her sexuality and image without also seeming cursed by them, one woman who marches boldly where others slunk. Pamela Anderson is Marilyn without the tragedy, Jayne Mansfield without the accident, Madonna without the whir­ring gears and reinventions, Paris Hilton without the pub­licity machine and Britney Spears without Kevin Federline. She is a sex symbol without apologies or complications or affectations, which means there is no one else quite like her. One could make the claim that if Marilyn Monroe was the tremulous sex goddess of the anxiety-ridden late 20th century, Pamela's transparency makes her the reigning sex goddess of the less inhibited 21st, the blonde of our times, though even in the past century she ranked eighth in this magazine's poll of the top 100 sex stars and E! called her the ultimate blonde. From September 1995 to September 2005 Pam was the sub­ject of more searches on Lycos.com than any other person. She has launched a line of women's apparel, co-authored two

steamy best-selling novels and starred in three television series, an action movie titled Barb Wire and a widely circulated (if surreptitiously obtained) home video of a sex-filled vacation with onetime husband Tommy Lee. Pam is a major fund­raiser for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and such causes as AIDS and hepatitis C, the latter of which she suffers from herself, having contracted the disease, she believes, by sharing a tattoo needle with Lee. To certify her sta­tus as the regnant sex symbol, she graces the cover of this magazine for the 12th time, more than any other woman has. Typically this sort of attention is the result of driving will, hard work and clever machinations. But not for Pamela. Anderson was born to two teenage parents—her father a furnace repairman, her mother a waitress—in the small town of Ladysmith in British Columbia, where her birth was noted as the first in the area on Canada's centennial, July 1, 1967. By her own account, hers was an uneventful childhood and generally a contented (text continued on page 144)

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one. There were tensions with her father, who Pamela later admitted was a verbally abusive alcoholic, but even this she didn't regard as traumatic. He "mellowed out," she would say. After she graduated—her high school proph­ecy was that she would be a California beach bum—she worked as a personal trainer with no higher ambition than to marry as quickly as she could and have children, as her teenage cousins did.

But her life took a very different turn when, as Pamela's fans know, she attended a British Columbia Lions football game wearing a tight Labatt brewery T-shirt and her picture was (lashed on the stadium's JumboTron. That arena became Pamela's Schwab's. During the game fans demanded to see the curvaceous blonde with the gleam­ing smile again, so she was escorted to the field. Her brief appearance led to her becoming the Labatt Blue Zone girl in the company's advertisements. Still, she might have been nothing more than a local sensation had a playboy scout not spotted her and asked if she would be interested in appearing in the magazine. She did her first cover for the October 1989 issue and then, after augmenting her breasts, became a Centerfold in February 1990. She parlayed that into a role as the tool girl on the hit sitcom Home Improvement, which in turn led to a starring role on Baywatch, for which she squeezed her voluptuous body into a snug red bath­ing suit. By the time she left Baywatch to star as a fashion-conscious private eye in a series she executive produced, V.I.P., she had become a national icon. It had taken her barely five years and not much sweat.

Yet while it sounds like the typi­cal career trajectory for a beautiful woman, it isn't, in part because it was so serendipitous and in part because Pamela was so casual about it. Mari­lyn Monroe's entree to Hollywood also came through modeling, but she worked hard to gain respectability as an actress and move from small roles to large ones, and when she achieved icon status it was because she had achieved stardom first. Whereas Pamela would be the first to admit she didn't work hard; she essentially played herself, and her career is the product of her celeb­rity as a playboy model and sex symbol rather than the cause. That career isn't even as an actress. Pam's job essentially is to be an open, happy, friendly and

rambunctiously funny girl, which is why she sees her celebrity as an end in itself rather than an impediment to some larger end the way so many other sex symbols did. As she puts it, she is her very own brand: just plain Pam.

In some quarters this has made her the target of criticism. She has been accused of being someone who, in historian Daniel Boorstin's famous formulation for celebrity, is "known for his well-knownness." Like many beautiful and voluptuous women who rose to prominence on their looks, she is also charged with being an image of artifice, a confection of too much hair, too large breasts, too small a waist for any natural human being, too sensual lips and way too much blonde. Indeed, the most com­mon adjective applied to her has been pneumatic, in acknowledgment of her breast implants. Following that line, one critic called her a con­structed goddess and said she was "cheesecake served up straight from the lab." Pamela certainly looks that way, so much a paragon of sexuality that she is practically a parody of it, as she herself well understands.

The problem with these criticisms is that they are not only inaccurate, they miss what may be the very essence of Pamela's appeal: her complete lack of artifice. Pamela, in truth, isn't enhanced save for her breasts, and those only slightly. Far from being plastic, what you see with Pamela Anderson is pretty much what you get. At five-seven and 105 pounds, she is practically a waif rather than an Amazon, and that nose, that waist, those lips and teeth, that hair are all hers, which means that when she poses she is au naturel in two senses—not just naked but unadulter­ated. Indeed, the striking thing about her is that unlike virtually every other sex symbol, including Marilyn, she is fresh rather than glamorous: a vegeta­ble-fed organic beauty.

This is not merely a function of her looks. What is true about her physi­cally is also an integral component of the personality that she projects and is so appealing to her admirers. With previous bombshells such as Marilyn or Mansfield, one assumed there was a distance between the persona and the person. This made these women seem larger than life, but it was also a source of the alleged tragedy they suf­fered, forcing them either to reconcile

the image with the life or to deny the latter as the image subsumed the life. None of this applies to Pamela because there is no distance between the per­son she is and the person she purports to be, no dichotomy to resolve, which not only makes her less complicated but also closes the gap between fantasy and reality. She's the kind of girl you may actually meet in a bar.

Pam has never taken herself seriously, and she seems bemused that anyone could. Instead she is self-deprecating and without illusions about herself— an attitude that has turned her from a putative actress into a comedienne scoring points off her own dearth of talent. "When you have nothing to live up to, you can't disappoint anybody,' she once joked to a group of television critics. As for her endowments, rather than huff that audiences refuse to see past them, Pamela has referred to them as "these things I'm just tagging along with." She is not only in on the joke, she is usually the one telling it.

If Pamela has no illusions, neither does she have aspirations. Marilyn studied the Method with the great act­ing teacher Lee Strasberg and clearly hoped that becoming a serious actress would allow her to escape from the image that had imprisoned her on­screen. Pamela is different. Not feel­ing imprisoned, she has nothing from which to escape.

Yet if Pamela hasn't had or seemed to want a conventional career as an entertainer, what she has had is a life that seems more entertaining than just about anything she could possi­bly have done on television or film. Her life certainly reinforces the idea that her sexuality isn't just an image; it is a choice. First there were the boy­friends, a seemingly endless skein of them: producer Jon Peters, surfer Kelly Slater, actor Scott Baio, Bayvatch co-star David Charvet, Sylvester Stal­lone, model Marcus Schenkenbergand actor Stephen Dorff. Then there was the marriage to Tommy Lee, whom she met at a 1995 New Year's party in Los Angeles when she bought the room Goldschlager and Lee thanked her by licking her face. When Pamela left for a photo shoot in Canciin soon after, Lee followed, staking out her hotel until she finally consented to see him. They were married on the beach four days later—Pam wearing a skimpy white bikini, Lee in shorts and shirtless to expose his tattoos. Instead of rings they had each other's name tattooed on their finger.

In many ways the marriage came to define her. Lee was a notorious womanizer with a reputation for hav­ing an oversize organ and insatiable lust. Pamela, with her own publicly

declaimed voraciousness, seemed the perfect mate. The Abelard and Heloise of hard rock, they lived with sexual aban­don, only underscoring further how little of Pamela's sex appeal was designed for public consumption, and they were frank about their hunger for each other. When someone stole their vacation video from their Malibu home and put it on the Internet, Pam did not seem embarrassed about being viewed during intercourse, performing fellatio or pleasuring her­self. She and Lee were angry only that the tape had been taken without their consent and that someone was profit­ing from it. When asked about the tape in interviews, Pam guilelessly acted as if everyone recorded themselves having sex. In any case, the tape, which came to serve as a metaphor for Pam's frankness, as well as an example of it, only added to her legend as a blithe sybarite.

Of course the marriage wasn't all sex. There was also drama. To hear Pam tell it, Lee was a self-absorbed man-child and alcoholic who became resentful when the couple had a son, Brandon, in 1996. Pam filed for divorce in Novem­ber of the same year, then reconciled with Lee. But in February 1998, with another new baby, Dylan, Pam said Lee had gotten violent again and kicked her during an argument. Lee provided only a feeble defense. He was convicted of spousal abuse and spent four months in the Los Angeles County jail. By the end of the year, Pam had been granted a divorce. But that still wasn't the end of the Pam-Tommy saga. They reconciled yet again in April 1999 (for the sake of the children, Pam said) and stayed

together until March 2000, when they broke up, though both of them kept say­ing they reserved the option to get back together even as Lee began a relation­ship with Prince's ex-wife Mayte and Pamela began seeing Kid Rock.

In the swirl of alcoholism and abuse that surrounded her marriage and divorce, it may have sounded as if the obligatory bombshell tragedy had at long last arrived: the violent man abus­ing his beautiful wife who just didn't have enough confidence to make a clean break and, when she finally did, couldn't live without a man. But once again Pamela has a different analysis. Even as she engaged Lee in a long, tor­turous custody battle, she never acted as if her situation were tragic or she had problems, and she always insisted she wasn't a victim. On the contrary, she turned the failed relationship into an object lesson of the evolution she was undergoing—not from sexpot to star, like most of her forebears, but from notorious to normal, like most of her fans. In effect, what Pam has done in her post-Lee phase is to close the dis­tance between herself and her audience in the same way she long ago closed the distance between her image and herself. She even removed her breast implants (temporarily) and cut her hair.

Of course Pamela isn't the first sex queen to talk of wanting to be a good mother and have a normal home life. One of the real tragedies of Marilyn Monroe's life was her desire for a child and her inability to have one. But Pamela is one of the first sex queens to publicly undergo the transformation from a wild

thing into a homebody, and in this, as in everything else, she seems totally sin­cere. "I used to say, 'If you're gonna do it, overdo it,"" she told one interviewer. "But I'm changing my theory on life. Things need to be done, not overdone." Significantly, when she divorced Lee, she had her ring tattoo converted from

TOMMY to MOMMY.

And Mommy is what she became and what she remains. "I'm an iiber-mother," she boasts. "I'm involved in everything." She prides herself on tak­ing her sons to preschool, doing play­ground cleanup duty, attending (heir sports matches, even teaching their Sunday-school classes, and she bristles at the notion that anyone would think her unfit, successfully suing Globe for libel when the tabloid accused her of being a heroin addict. "I'm a healthy person," she says. "I'm not this drunk, drug-addicted, raving crazy person. That's just an image created by the media, and it's crap." In fact, the Globe story was something of an aberration. The media have seldom besmirched Pam as out of control; they have sim­ply recounted her sexual exploits, which she has gladly confirmed. But since Lee she has been on a normalcy kick, and in the same way that her life had been her career in her pre-mom libertine phase when she was cavorting with Tommy, her life is her career in her domestic phase as she tends to her two boys—though obviously without the melodrama. She describes herself now as ordinary, gibing that if anyone were to do a reality show of her daily existence, it would be boring. And she says she is trying to close one final gap, too—the gap between lust and love. "I'm trying to learn to be friends with someone and care about him instead of trying to hold on to somebody so intense," she told an interviewer.

That Pamela has been able to effect this change without also desexualiz-ing herself is as much a tribute to her openness as to her body. This isn't a dif­ferent Pam; it is just a different side of Pam that co-exists with the sexual Pam. Indeed, she never intended to jettison her sexiness for some sort of matronli-ness. That became clear last July when she suddenly renewed her old romance with Kid Rock—not exactly the pic­ture of white-picket-fence domestic­ity—and wound up marrying him on a yacht in St.-Trope/, in her traditional bridal bikini. With Kid Rock she is both vixen and hausfrau. Her life has simply expanded, and she is sharing it with her fans as she has always shared it before.

And that is precisely what makes Pamela Anderson the sex symbol of the new century at a time when people seem to want simplicity rather than complexity, the straightforward rather than the phony. Yes, she is gorgeous. Yes, she is hypersexual. Yes, she has

a long personal saga that appeals to the voyeur in us all. But what Pamela Anderson has above everything else is a complete lack of inhibition both physically and emotionally. She seems congenitally unable to dissemble, which provides an intimacy fans do not enjoy with any other sex star. "People respond to the fact that she never tries to hide anything," says Steven Levitan, creator and producer of her canceled sitcom Stacked. "II something happens, she just comes out and talks about it." Pamela lives uncensored. Her face, which isn't designed for pensiveness, isn"t designed for concealment, either. She is unashamed, uncomplicated, unapologetic, oblivious. If Marilyn Monroe was the Freudian sex goddess,

a seeming bundle of neuroses, at least as she was characterized, Pamela Anderson is the Cappian sex goddess, after Li'I Abner cartoonist Al Capp, a veritable Daisy Mae. She can be impul­sive, but she is not psychotic, disturbed, difficult, deluded, divided or deep. She is just a big, happy, buxom girl—a sex goddess who hasn't paid any price for her sexiness and demands no price from us. She is a girl who somehow, despite it all, has managed to avoid the anxieties that have always entangled sex queens and the tragedies that have always befallen them.

And that is why we love her—because Pamela Anderson just is.

Unlike other sex symbols, she is fresh rather than glamorous: a vegetable-fed organic beauty.